Hello from San Diego area

[rmzalbar]

Hello all,

After a large amount of general decluttering several months back, I rescued the following items of my childhood from my now-closed (yay!!) longtime storage unit:

C64 breadbin 250407 + 1541-II
Atari 2600 rev 12
Intellivision I
Amiga 500 Rev. 5a
Amiga A1200 Rev. 1D1

Sadly, my C64 disks were not stored, and I am missing one of the hard disks from my A1200 (but I think all that was probably my SIRTIS.GIF on it anyways, so big deal.)

The reason I have the rev numbers is because I also racked everything up on my soldering gear and gave each unit a good cleaning and refurb. I've recapped all units, applied TSB updates, cleaned pots, joysticks, undid some ugly teenage hacks and redid them more professionally, etc. Everything is done now except for the A1200, where I am having problems with the accelerator board. I'm still waiting for floppy emulators, and CompactFlash replacements for the poor old hard disks also.

Here's a few pics. Unfortunately I didn't take many pictures of the process or always of the finished result - can add more later.

Atari 2600
Recap and VRM replacements. Static protection diodes added. Static protection tape replaced. Color boost resistor added. Full cleaning and switch refurb.


Intellivision
Aside from the recap and VRM replacements, I also replaced some suspicious clock generator transistors that had been so hot they burned the PCB on both sides.


C64 and 1541-II
The 1541 definitely had leakers. All cans replaced on both units. Mechanical refurb of disk drive. Too bad many disks are crumbling or moldy..

 

[rmzalbar]

Amiga 500

I had an AdSpeed stacked on top of an AdIde in there propping up the keyboard and preventing me from closing the case. Got a bare 68000 relocator board from ebay and it fits perfectly now. The A500 is all done and back together playing Dungeon Master till 2AM. Last order of business is to solder a header board over the weird 44-pin 2.54 mm pitch header, and a standard 2.00mm pitch 44-bin header onto that. Then I can drop a CF card onto the AdIde once my hardware shows up. Will upload final pics soon.

 

[rmzalbar]

A1200
The case and keyboard responded outstandingly well to the peroxide.

This one is nearly 100% now, except for the M1230XA card which is acting unstable unless I blow a fan on it. I started trying to get a replacement CPU to see if that would help, but have been totally blown away by the trouble with fake CPUs. The worst part of this, is that I replaced my old 68881RC16 with an ebay 68882RC50A while doing the refresh, before testing. I didn't want to power it up until I had removed the SMD electrolytics and repaired any trace damage. (A few leakers, no trace damage, fortunately.) The 68882 I *now* know must be fake/rebinned, and has possibly damaged the 68030RC50B CPU. Everything was fine before it went into storage.. I wish I had known about the china fakes issue beforehand.

EDIT: The 68030 was bad. Replaced with an MC68030RC50C - all is good now



A photo of my M1230XA card with the (probably fake) 68882. This card is unstable even with the FPU and the SIMM removed, once the CPU warms up. It was fine when it went into storage. Maybe it just needs a new CPU - I notice this is a B model, so a C would run cooler if I can find a non-fake one.